Yo-Yo Boing! (Spanglish Edition)

A native of Puerto Rico, Giannina Braschi is an influential and versatile writer of poetry, fiction, and essays. She was a tennis champion and fashion model during her youth in San Juan, before moving to Madrid to study with the Spanish poets Carlos Busoño and Claudio Rodriguez. She lived in Paris, Rome, and London before settling in New York, where she has taught at Rutgers University, City University, and Colgate University. She holds a Ph.D. in Golden Age Spanish literature and has written on Cervantes, Garcilaso, Lorca, Machado, Vallejo, and Bécquer. Her cutting-edge work in Spanish, Spanglish, and English has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, el diario, PEN American Center, Ford Foundation, Danforth Scholarship, InterAmericas, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, and Reed Foundation. She currently serves as a literary judge for the PEN Book Awards.

“An ‘in-your-face assertion’ of the vitality of Latino culture in the U.S.” —New York Daily News“Yo-Yo Boing! sashays between English and Spanish much the way Puerto Rico itself sashays between two cultures, two identities, and two languages.” —The San Juan Star“The best demonstration yet of Braschi’s extraordinary virtuosity, her command of many different registers, her dizzying ability to switch between English and Spanish. It is also a very funny novel, a novel of argumentative conversations that cover food, movies, literature, art, the academy, sex, memory, and everyday life. It is a book that should be performed as well as read.” —Jean Franco, Columbia University“A bilingual rollercoaster…A rush of gloriously nuanced sentences that teeter between the grotesque and burlesque…the text transmutes poetry into novel, into screenplay, dialogue, and by extension to more and sometimes unidentified variants.” —Doris Sommer, Harvard University“A literary liberation…Braschi’s melange of prose and poetry, English and Spanish, is admirable for its energy, its experimental format and its insistence on Spanglish as a literary language.” —Publishers Weekly“Braschi writes beautiful, malleable Spanish, playing with word forms in a musical, rhythmic way…The book is often exciting, as much a performance piece as a novel, reflecting the way language is actually used.” —Library Journal“[Yo-Yo Boing!] bristles with lively…literary conversation. This in-your-face assertion of the vitality of Latino culture has many agreeable moments.” —Kirkus Reviews